A friend of mine wants to deliver some one-on-one online teaching via video chat. It seems like a good idea, except for the fact that I can almost never get a Skype video session to work reliably or smoothly with a friend or relative, even when both ends are served by broadband and reasonably new devices. Given that there will be a range of students and they will have differing hardware, software, and connectivity situations, what are some good choices?

And let’s maybe renew the discussion that I started in February asking why Skype was so bad. The companies offering video chat, e.g., Skype (Microsoft), Yahoo!, Google, and Apple, have near-infinite money. So there should not be any constraint on programmers or fancy algorithms. As the software runs peer-to-peer, there should not be any constraint on how much CPU and bandwidth can be consumed. Yet a comment on the previous posting stated, quite credibly, that the Polycom system worked far better than PC-based systems. Is there a non-free system that would be reasonable for students and teachers to install that would work a lot better than the standard free ones?

[Update: I forgot to ask… why don’t these systems allow recording for later review? Isn’t it just as easy for the software to write to the hard drive at the same time that it is writing to the display?]

19 Comments

Tim

For several years now, an informal group of event professionals has been holding weekly video chats. During that time we have used every free video-conferencing system we could find. Every one was unusable for someone’s combination of PC/videocam/audio setup.

Until Google Hangouts. Since this service started, random selections of up to ten out of >20 participants have been able to chat with very few problems. Unlike earlier services, everyone seems to be able to make hangouts work on their specific equipment.

There are occasional glitches, but they are usually restricted to one participant being momentarily disconnected. The hangout continues and the person can reconnect in about 30 seconds.

The automatic audio/screen switching works far better than any other service I’ve used, and feedback is normally suppressed well enough so that most people don’t have to wear headphones.

Chris

I’ve used Skype a lot. It’s great. Works most of the time, rather well. On lots of different platforms.

But since I got an iPad, I’ve been using FaceTime, and the quality and ease of use and reliability are infinitely better. It has almost no features (no screenshots, integrated chat, videoconferencing, …). But what it does it does very, very well (I am an Apple skeptic so it hurts me to say this).

Chaminda: Thanks for the Webex recommendation. Maybe that is the best choice, actually, because they say that they offer a “record” feature (https://signup.webex.com/Global/documents/ComparePlans.pdf says that this is included in all plans). And a third person could join to observe. It requires “1 host license” so perhaps each teacher would need to sign up as a “host”.

Claire Cunningham

To clarify the above — we’re considering these options for one-on-one music lessons primarily, hence my above comment about music lessons. So audio/visual quality is probably the most important aspect to me, though it’s also interesting to see people’s opinions regarding video chat experience in general.

George

WebEx is our primarily web meeting tool here at my work. We use it internally as well as externally (when folks outside my company are also invited.)

I have been using it for over 6 years now (on average few times a week anywhere from 30 min. to over 1 hour) and it works very well. In some cases, I started a meeting with over 50 users (and I know others have had over 100) with no real issues.

Its sharing capability will let you share all of your desktop or selected application on your desktop. If you have dual monitor, you can only share what’s on one of those monitors (the one where WebEx’s browser is on.)

Yes, it will let you record both video and voice (whatever you are sharing (i.e.: the other party is seeing) can be recorded.)

Mark Lutton

Ryan

I’ve seen you mention your problems with Skype a few times. It’s strange because Skype seems to work really well for me. We even use it at work to interview international candidates. Works great AustraliaEurope and AustraliaUSA.

I use a Macbook Pro with the built-in camera. Logically, it shouldn’t make a difference but maybe Skype relies on the OS to provide camera codecs?. When I talk to my Dad on a PC it looks horrendous but when I talk to another Mac user it’s almost pixel perfect.